Adman's dream: culture by the handful

David Sherman

She’s fourth in line at the café, cell phone in hand. Like just about everyone else in the joint. Her phone’s playing a video of a woman putting on makeup, except she’s not looking at it. She waits five minutes or so to be supplied with coffee and whatever and the phone, a glowing part of her, ignored, plays silently to my knees.

A guy in shorts and T-shirt is pacing the gym floor. White antennas in his ear. Phone in his hand. He’s having a loud conversation. The phone is at his side as he talks, loud enough to be heard from the stationary bikes to the row of dumb bells the other side of the gym. Sounds as if he’s talking business. Least that’s what it seems to the rest of us sweating through a workout. We can all hear him. And his determined voice is not helpful to those of us who like to think about what we’re doing. That’s lost on him. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s his way of saying, “Look at me,” a carryover from those who post their lives on Facebook or wherever. Everyone else in the gym has a phone. They seem to be satisfied staring into it only between sets. Weights for 30 seconds. Phone for five minutes. Repeat. No one wants to be alone with their thoughts.

I’m sitting on one of four chairs pushed together waiting for a consultation at the pharmacy. Madame Chartrand is on my right, leaning on a cane, struggling to stand and consult the pharmacist. An elderly man descends into the chair on my left, holding a phone the size of a paperback novel. He plays a video with sound. He’s a foot away, a fact he doesn’t seem to realize or care about. The phone’s him. I stand and start browsing the laundry detergents.

There’s a table of four behind us at dinner. It’s a good middle eastern restaurant. The parents on looking at their iPhones, exchanging words here and there. Their two kids are on tablets encased in bright plastic with handles, the better to attract them and hold onto them. When the parents have finished dinner, dad rises and pull the iPads away from the kids. Father is a gizmo collector and porter. Children resent the loss of their screens. It’s like being pulled away from dessert.

Over breakfast at a B&B, a family of five is also plugged in. Everyone has their own screen. The kids look all to be under 10. One little boy, maybe six or seven, keeps peering over the screen looking at his parents, his brother and sister. He seems to want to engage. But no one looks back. His eyes return to the screen. Then again to his family. Then again to the screen. The screens are family, perhaps more than him.

New York Times’ columnist Frank Bruni writes weekly, usually about Trump, always about politics, for more than a decade. Last week he lost it over his phone, its apps and operating systems designed to make life easier but, instead, is making life more complicated. Driving him crazy enough to ignore Trump this week.

Cell phones are not phones, or libraries or video display units or cameras or all of them above. They’re a culture, a way to live, a place to live. A community.

For some, or many, it’s the new always-on television, playing in kitchen, bedroom, living room, like bars with TVs splashing light regardless if anyone’s watching, or if there’s anyone to watch.

But it’s mobile and you’re not only the programmer, but director of programming. There are no longer 500 channels, there are one billion websites, most designed to be attracting hits to pacify Google ads. Google reads your Gmail or google inquiries and feeds you what it thinks you want. Maybe it’s even listening to us.

Designed to entice, engage and hang on, it’s small bites of stimulation in bytes of its own language – emojis, its own slang – LOL, BTW, WTF, its own media, influence, skullduggery.

American culture is industrial and the new phone culture is of unparalleled industrial grandeur. Energy, automobiles, aviation and mobile devices, keepers of the economy, drivers of same, devotees of planned obsolescence.

It’s a voice of consumption. And it’s part of more lives than it’s not. And it’s idle consumption. It comes to you, wherever you are, except perhaps on an Airbus or in a submarine.

It’s a companion, a community of many colours, a place to hang out with the like- minded, the fashion conscious, race conscious, hate purveyors. In the phone there is reassurance and validation. Place for everyone.

For the privileged, it’s a hand-held bank, payment device, set of books, invoice and bill collector. With email and various apps, it’s work and love, a link to food and travel, an advisor, a sanctuary, a curtain, a lock on the door. Block sender means you filter out the undesirable. Inside this community of exclusion are only like-minded, those who live by the phone, by the grift of the influencers, the just-like-us paid to seduce and include. As long as you have your credit card in hand.

It’s one-on-one capitalism, private, discreet, no embarrassment necessary. It’s a master salesman, an adman’s wet dream.

Nobel-prize-winning miniaturization is now the largest tool of enterprise – advertising attached to your body, hour after hour, day after day – designed to seduce us into enthusiastic fidelity and reverence. Like cars, new models every year.